subject: Why Does Your Metabolism Slow Down When You Diet? [print this page] Why Does Your Metabolism Slow Down When You Diet?
Have you ever tried a serious diet? If so, you are no doubt aware that things will often begin very smoothly, with your losing a bunch of pounds very early on. If you are serious about your diet and control what you eat and exercise, then it shouldn't be very difficult to lose a pound or two of fat a week. Often you will lose a ton of water weight, perhaps even some muscle, but things should move at a fast clip to begin with. Then you hit a plateau, or things just stall down. Suddenly it seems like you can't lose weight no matter what you try. The reason is because your metabolism has slowed down, and all of a sudden it just takes forever to burn calories. Why does this happen, and how can you prevent it?
One of the simplest reasons why people burn less calories as they lose weight is because they are becoming lighter. People with less body mass burn less calories. Somebody who is walking around carrying three hundred pounds simply has to work harder to move than somebody who is carrying only one hundred and fifty. This means that as you lose weight your body has to work less to simply move, and this can mean that your metabolism slows as you burn less calories than you used to.
Another reason comes down to your hormones. Everything from appetite to fat burning is controlled by hormone signals to your glands, and when you begin to lose weight through a serious diet your hypothalamus is alerted. All of a sudden everything begins to change as your body puts on the breaks, and now you have all these different hormones such as insulin, leptin, ghrelin and more messing things up.
What happens is that your body adapts to the diet. All these hormones make it so that your body burns less calories than it used to, such that it can actually exceed your expectations and make it really hard to lose weight.
In order to prevent this you often have to do something completely counter intuitive which is to eat more than your diet allows in order to reset your metabolism, to cause it to spike up and allow you to burn more calories once you begin dieting again. Counter intuitive but proven by biology. You need to always watch what your hormones are doing so as to diet successfully.
